Towards the end of the 1800s, there were three primary American groups competing to invent technology to record and play back audio.
Alexander Graham Bell worked with with Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell in at their
Volta Laboratory in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., while
Thomas A. Edison worked from his
Menlo Park facilities, and
Emile Berliner worked in
his independent laboratory in
his home. To secure the rights to their inventions, the three groups sent samples of their work to the Smithsonian. These recordings became part of the permanent collections, now consisting of 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made.
But knowledge of their contents was limited to old, short descriptions, as the rubber, beeswax, glass, tin foil and brass recording media are fragile, and playback devices might damage the recordings, if such working devices are even available. That is, until
a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory came together to make 2D and 3D optical scanners, capable of
visually recording the patterns marked on discs and cylinders, respectively.
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posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 10, 2012 -
20 comments
A decade after the death of renowned folklorist Alan Lomax, his vision of a "global jukebox" is being realized: his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February. NYT article
here.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Jan 30, 2012 -
39 comments
78 78s - In Search Of Lost Time - is a streaming mix of beautiful 78s from around the world, collected and curated by Ian Nagoski. "I started sifting through boxes of junky old 78s that no one else wanted about 15 years ago, and almost right away, I made a rule: Anything that wasn't in English, buy it."
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posted by carter
on Jan 29, 2012 -
15 comments
Even people who would normally never care about something Judy Garland-related marvel at the incredible pathos and dark insanity of these tapes, which come off like Garland performing in a one-woman show written by Samuel Beckett.
posted by Trurl
on Dec 28, 2011 -
27 comments
The French romantic thriller “Diva” dashes along with a pellmell gracefulness, and it doesn’t take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. It’s a glittering toy of a movie... This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix... who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience. - Pauline Kael, 1982
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posted by Trurl
on Sep 16, 2011 -
33 comments
What then happens is an unbelievable series of Kafkaesque email threads, out-of-office messages, invented holidays, bizarre threats, secret handshakes. If you’re lucky, and very very persistent, you might end up with a CD of it, along with a note saying that “this never happened” and “don’t tell anybody you have this.” Nico Muhly on the difficulty of
listening to one's own work.
posted by villanelles at dawn
on Sep 10, 2011 -
11 comments
People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest is a 65 minute compilation of stage banter by Paul Stanley of KISS.
Paul repeatedly reminds the Army that they’re getting their money’s worth... , that the next tune is the first time they’ve played it on tour, that he was talking backstage to someone... about what kind of alcohol that people in the area like to drink, that they’re just getting started, and that he’s got an “uzi of ooze” in his pants.
posted by Trurl
on Jun 4, 2011 -
69 comments
The veteran recording engineer and seven-time grammy winner
Roger Nichols lost his battle with pancreatic cancer and
passed away April 9th at age 66. Though not a household name, you've undoubtedly heard at least one album he did the sound for. Some of the artists he engineered recordings for were Stevie Wonder, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Frank Zappa, Donald Fagen, John Denver, the Beach Boys, Crosby Stills & Nash, Al Di Meola, Roy Orbison, Andy Laverne, Plácido Domingo, Gloria Estefan, Diana Ross, Rickie Lee Jones, Kenny Loggins, Mark Knopfler, Michael McDonald, and Toots Thielemans, among others. He also invented the first functional drum sampling machine
WENDL (.pdf file), first used on the 1979 "Gaucho" album.
He is likely best known for the amazing pristine sound he achieved for every album done by Mssrs. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, aka
Steely Dan. He was a giant in his field,
a real innovator, and it is a sad loss for the industry.
posted by Seekerofsplendor
on Apr 11, 2011 -
28 comments
Dictaphone Parcel. Lauri Warsta put a tape recorder inside a box, set it recording, sealed up the box, sent it from London to Finland through the post, then animated the captured audio.
Previously
posted by sleepcrime
on Sep 22, 2010 -
13 comments
1. Create a record label named "Unknown."
2. Form a band named "Various Artists."
3. (step 3 not required)
4. PROFIT!
No, really: Please take your royalty check
Royalties are piling up from digital music streams, and a nonprofit has to track down artists who don't know. Then it has to convince them it's not a scam.
posted by planetkyoto
on Mar 12, 2010 -
20 comments
40 years ago today, The Rolling Stones played two concerts at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. In the darkness of the audience was a man known to history only as
"Dub"...
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posted by Joe Beese
on Nov 9, 2009 -
13 comments
The Present Sound of London --
"I’ve been lured to London by money at the hottest, stickiest time of year. Every time I visit, I’m struck by the noises—not necessarily their volume, but their strangeness and variety in comparison to the quiet humdrum of the provincial town where I live. So this time I’m equipped with an audio recorder." By Giles Turnbull.
posted by nthdegx
on Jul 21, 2009 -
8 comments
Last year we discussed a recently discovered 10-second audio recording from 1860 that was thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice, a girl or woman singing the 18th century French folk song
“Au Clair de la Lune”. Turns out, it was being played too fast - slow it down and it's the voice of the inventor himself. As well, a number of other recordings have been found, pushing back the oldest recording to 1857.
Hear it all on NPR (5-min).
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posted by stbalbach
on Jun 1, 2009 -
24 comments
Andy Partridge (ex-
XTC frontman) and producer
John Leckie (Stone Roses/Radiohead) discuss the making of The Dukes of the Stratosphear 25 o'clock EP, getting sacked by Mary Margaret O'Hara, Roy Harper kissing a sheep and recording Syd Barrett in Abbey Road in 1975 (parts
I and
II).
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posted by johnny novak
on Apr 24, 2009 -
24 comments
In a single 1931
document, electrical engineer
Alan Blumlein patented stereo records, stereo movie sountracks and surround sound. His equipment was used to make some of the
first stereo recordings at EMI's Abbey Road studios - several decades before the technology came into popular use. Blumlein went on to pioneer
405 line TV (the first wholly electronic format which won out over John Logie Baird's rival system) and to produce the equipment that made the
first outside TV broadcast possible. At the outbreak of World War 2 he was a key architect of the secret
H2S radar project. Unfortunately he was killed in a plane crash while testing the technology and the whole incident was kept secret. Hence he remains an obscure figure despite his achievements. A
recent BBC Radio 4 program contains a lot of the archive stereo footage and tells his story.
posted by rongorongo
on Aug 7, 2008 -
5 comments
Tourists black out reflective retinas in snapshots before printing them, and millions of people refer to strangers they’ve never spoken to as friends, because they’ve connected through a social-networking platform. [...] It should come as no surprise, then, that singers sometimes choose to correct recorded flaws in pitch with modern software, like Antares’s Auto-Tune.Sasha Frere-Jones on auto-tuning, in The New Yorker.
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posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Jun 10, 2008 -
98 comments
An Artist's
view from her tent. Listen to the view. Yes, listen. Katie Paterson via mobile phone and underwater mike at a glacier lake in Iceland, captures underwater sounds of melting and cracking Jökulsárlón Glacier.
Hear it piddling away. Call to listen what the seals are talking about, if they're nearby.
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posted by alicesshoe
on Apr 2, 2008 -
9 comments
The Sound Of Clothes features
the precise sound of fashion materials such as feathers, sequins, glass crystals and beads, nylon, taffeta, leather, velvet, jacquard, zips and metallic chains, recorded in an anechoic chamber.
Videos linked from the page might be NSFW.
posted by jack_mo
on Mar 12, 2008 -
26 comments
The
Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section was comprised of four session musicians operating out of the tiny northern Alabama town of town
Muscle Shoals.
Just four unassuming crackers who happened to have provided the funky underpinning for a
huge number of hit songs by, among others,
Aretha Franklin,
Wilson Pickett,
Paul Simon,
Joe Cocker,
The Staple Singers ,
Jimmy Cliff and
many, many others. Hey, they were the
house band to the greats. Big respect to the men from
3614 Jackson Highway!
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posted by flapjax at midnite
on Feb 24, 2008 -
27 comments
